Julie Sweet: Thanks.
Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Darrin Peller with Wolfe Research. Please go ahead.
Darrin Peller: Hey. Thanks guys. I mean when you put the pieces together with the bookings we are seeing and the actual changes in the efficiency, it really does sound like we are finally seeing more of a divergence in linearity between headcount growth and bookings capabilities and revenue contribution. So, I mean I know you mentioned AI, obviously, is a big theme. But is there other factors that we can point to that are structurally part of the model now, or is it a function of the mix type of bookings or anything else?
KC McClure: Yes. Maybe I will just talk a little bit about what you are seeing in terms of headcount, Darrin, and what we are recording in revenue in terms of how we are generating our revenue. And Julie, if you want to add in, you certainly can. But in terms of what you are seeing is we have been very focused on hiring, balancing our supply, demand to what we need to both sell and drive the revenue to meet our client demand and continue to take market share. And part of what you are seeing throughout the year is we have been continuing €“ you have heard us talk about us really focusing on continued strong pricing. Again, reminder, that when we talk about pricing, it’s the margin on the work that we sold. And that has been improving over the last five quarters. It’s not stable, which we are really happy with. And so some of that is part €“ there is a part of that that’s helping to drive our revenue production as well.
Julie Sweet: And I would just say, a lot of its mix, right. If you have longer transformational deals like the numbers of people that you need to drive are different. So, I wouldn’t say there is some big, wait a minute, we have got some new inflection point where you have disconnected more. As I talked about earlier, we have been disconnecting to some degree, for a while now, but there is no big change in that perspective. Just as we have executed our strategy. And I think it’s so important to understand that it has been a deliberate strategy to say we want to do transformational deals. We want to take our SNC people who have deep industry and functional knowledge, put them together with our technology people to do either big implementations, right, that are changing the digital core or transformations that are coupled with managed services and just how that works out.
And so while we love when the economy is booming and SNC and the small deals are also booming, the strategy is to be at the core so that we continue €“ we help them with one big project, we understand their company and met it more. We take them on the next big project, and we are really getting that kind of stickiness in our relationships. And so we will kind of deal with the sort of softness in the smaller deals. But over time, this is exactly what we want to do. And in fact, if you think about this year, consulting €“ last quarter, we thought consulting this year would be mid-single digits to high-single digits. We now see it as mid-single digits for the year, and we are fine with that, right, because that’s about kind of lower SNC and SI smaller deals.
North America in December, we thought it was going to be mid-single to high-single digits. We now see that as the mid-single digits for the year. Again, it’s because sort of the caution that’s impacting the smaller deals, record sales, great large transformational deals, and that’s just going to how it deals with. And that’s why, as KC said before, SNC, we are going to see a very similar performance next quarter probably, and it may take a little bit longer to reconnect with growth. But remember, we don’t look at that as separate. We see SNC as a competitive differentiator for these larger transformational deals, which is our strategy.
